


step toward glory

by thisnewthing (strokeof_genie)



Series: steps'verse [1]
Category: Captain America (Comics), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-18
Updated: 2014-04-18
Packaged: 2018-01-19 19:44:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1481695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strokeof_genie/pseuds/thisnewthing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Through trial and error, the Winter Soldier remembers that he's Bucky Barnes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	step toward glory

**Author's Note:**

> The "glory" in the title refers to Steve, of course. This is the first part of steps'verse. I actually started it before [pressed against the sky](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1462897) but I wanted to skip ahead to the fun parts so that one was finished first.

1.  


The first thing the Winter Soldier does is pull a civilian underneath the overhang of a bridge to steal the man’s coat and backpack. He leaves the man alive and with all of his identification and credit cards, talking only the cash (34 dollars in 1 twenty, 1 ten, and 4 ones, as well as 75 cents in change, all quarters). The coat is more of a jacket and is tight on his upper arms and shoulders but it hides his very distinctive appearance well enough. The Winter Soldier idly thinks about the pros and cons of killing the man, but since he doesn’t have to it’s hard to find the will. 

As he leaves the man lying under the bridge he forces himself to think about the current situation and his immediate future, rather than Captain America, the man he somehow knows. He debates risking an appearance at one of the established safe houses, but with SHIELD’s secrets public he knows that it isn’t safe. 

He removes his thigh holsters and discards them; he puts his handguns in his pockets. While walking down the streets he easily dodges pedestrians who are in fits about the Helicarriers and the destruction. With their distraction, it’s easy for him to pick up a few more wallets and remove the cash. He pulls a hat from a street vendor onto his head as he passes, while the owner is reading aloud SHIELD documents that he pulled offline.

The Winter Soldier, by the time he’s found a cheap motel, has acquired 164 dollars in 1 fifty, 4 twenties, 1 ten, and 24 ones, as well as a 2 more dollars in quarters, and 3 dimes and 4 nickels. He had left the pennies with the wallets when he dropped them, because people who pay in pennies attract too much attention. He has an old leather backpack found next to a man yelling into a cellphone, and a long sleeved shirt that has a picture of the Lincoln Memorial on the front, that was taken from a street vendor. He also has a bottle of water, a bottle of orange juice, and a small plastic wrapped sandwich that he paid for.

He checks in and spends most of his money paying for three nights. The fire escape is clear and in usable condition, and the walls are thin enough that he could get through them and out from another room quickly enough. After securing the door and leaving one handgun under a pillow he takes the other one with him into the bathroom.

He strips down and showers, taking stock of the shape his body is in and the damage he took in the fight and the fall. The bruising will be gone within a few days, but he can’t tell if his ribs are broken. He wonders what will become of his arm now that there is no one who can repair it. He has had to do field repairs while out of technician range, but there is no end in sight for this.

He removes one of the panels of his arm, the one underneath, to unplug the wires that power the killswitch embedded. It hurts, because it’s supposed to when he does it; he has no reason he should know that, just that he does. He suspects that this is not the first time his handlers have lost him.

He has to lie down and fight the waves of pain and nausea, clenching his jaw so that he doesn’t grind his teeth hard enough to break, or bite his tongue. When it passes he finds that he has lost less motor skills than expected, but more feeling than expected. He pulls out the useless killswitch because it is also probably a tracking device, and carefully tests his arm by crushing it. 

He replaces the panel, and repeats the process one more with a killswitch in the wrist. This time the pain is less, but that is worse since it means that his dexterity and motion range has dropped again. He breathes through the pain and crushes the removed circuitry, and then stands to stretch, to lunge, to shadowbox, and to get a feel for the changes. 

Once cataloged, he eats and drinks methodically and wonders what will happen when he doesn’t have his memories wiped. The Winter Soldier wonders if he will understand how he knows Captain America, who was his target, who he didn’t kill. He knows he had to protect the Captain but he doesn’t know why. After the meal he makes himself sleep.

  


2.  


The three days go by and he’s moving again. Through pick-pocketing and thieving he has acquired a stash of 467 dollars and 45 cents, mostly in innocuous twenties and tens. He uses some of it to do laundry, and buys some of the clothes that are for sale in the laundromat that have apparently been abandoned.

The Winter Soldier has not found a viable source of weaponry yet; he will not return to Hydra now that they are in the public eye, and he finds that he doesn't want to. He’s becoming more than what they let him be, and he’s remembering things. It isn’t pleasant, and it’s confusing, but he feels sometimes. It’s something he doesn’t want to stop.

There’s snow and falling and cold in his dreams. There’s a flash of blond hair moving quickly, above him and too far away. There’s a pain where his arm is now bionic. There’s blood on ice and snow. 

There’s a profound sense of loss that isn’t actually the Winter Soldier’s, but it lingers in his gut as he tries to fall back asleep, in a new hotel close to the National Mall. There may be answers there for him, or there might not be; either way he is in charge of himself for the first time he can remember.

  


3.  


He remembers a lot of the mundane from his time working for the Red Room. He remembers waking from stasis and the strange passivity he had, almost tranquility, from being wiped blank. He remembers the electrocution and the wiping, too, and feels so angry and helpless so suddenly that he can only breath through it, or else he’d be hitting things.

He remembers training to become as good of an assassin as he is, and he remembers training other people. He remembers red hair, and a red smile, but he doesn’t know if it’s lipstick or her blood or his blood or someone else’s. 

He remembers that sometimes he was on the verge of knowing things from his past, and if they weren’t near a facility to wipe his memories they would drug him and beat him. He remembers several people dying almost every time they tried to subdue him, but that never stopped them; collateral damage didn’t matter in the long run. 

He remembers the car bombings he orchestrated, the shootings, the assassinations that were to look like muggings gone wrong. He knows that there are a lot more deaths by his hand than SHIELD knows, because he wasn’t always working on the books; not everything he accomplished made it to paper. He was personal property and he did as he was told.

He isn’t anymore, but that doesn’t mean he knows what he is.

  


4.  


His arm is well-made. He does the best he can with the field diagnostics he is capable of running. He steals gun oil and ammunition from a superstore that carries both, as well as food. He takes care of his arm first, working oil into the joints and hinges carefully, and then he checks the wiring as gently as he knows how and to the best of his ability.

His training never covered the intricate circuitry and so he can only continue on, as he doesn’t recognize any more killswitches. He remembers what they do now, and how they incapacitate him when they are activated with an overwhelming jolt of electricity. Sometimes they just halt the arm’s use until he reports back, but he hasn’t found any of that kind that he recognizes.

He takes care of his guns next. He has always tried to be practical when choosing his weapons, and the handguns are easily concealed in his pockets. He can’t stockpile as much as he’d like, and it is making him uneasy. 

He has the backpack which has his stolen clothes, a toothbrush in a baggie that he got from the hotel, stolen toothpaste, and a portion of his money. He has a clip-on sleeping bag attached to the bag, as well as the small tent he acquired. He’d like a backpack with framework, but what he has is serviceable. It has enough space for the excess ammunition and the oil, as well as a few knives, and everything else he has acquired.

He keeps his handguns in his pockets, as well as some of the money. He has more knives hidden on his person. He avoids going anywhere that requires a pat-down or walking through a metal detector. He avoids places with security cameras. There is a trail of stolen cars in his wake; he wears gloves when driving them, and pockets the gloves when out of the car.

He travels north and knows that it is both because he can wear long sleeves the further north he gets without drawing suspicion, but it is also because New York seems to be the place to go. He takes it slowly, stopping in places with little more than a hotel and a bar to the town. 

He steals a first aide kit that includes a sling and gauze, and wraps his metal arm up to the forearm. With that covered and inside a sling he’s just another person with a sad story, and most people are too polite to stare, or get uncomfortable by the thought of a person functioning at less than optimal capacity and the fact that they might be called on to help. The Winter Soldier relies on understanding human nature while distancing himself from having one, and it is rapidly becoming an issue inside himself.

  


5.  


It takes weeks of travelling and camping and hotels before he’s recognized. When it happens he’s in a strange space mentally; his name is James Buchanan Barnes, and he is a World War II veteran, a sniper, and Captain America’s best friend. He saw this all with his own eyes on display, he saw his own face.

Except he is none of those things, because he doesn’t understand what any of it means to him. He remembers more in his dreams but those are fragmented and interspersed with his training. The Winter Soldier is an asset and a tool, a weapon capable of mass destruction. 

He is aware that somehow he is all of these things, he is one person, but the man who the Captain called Bucky is not around in enough memories. The Winter Soldier doesn’t understand the emotions he almost feels, and there’s a piece missing that he can’t figure out. A vital part of who he is, is missing because he doesn’t understand or remember what he felt when he was called Bucky.

He’s recognized in New York, when he finally makes it up there. He goes there because he’s been there before, he has lived there, and he has fragmented memories of a mission completed and then - did he run? He has no memories of fighting the programming, but then again he wouldn’t. The scenery was different, the cars older. He was in a halfway house, or a shelter, or a hostel of some kind. It was raided and he was drugged, and taken back into custody. 

He’s sitting on a bench waiting for a train, arm wrapped and in the sling, thinking about being lost and confused in a big city with streets that didn’t exist the last time he was here. To his left there is a man watching him closely, and the Winter Soldier has already made the man on his right. He’s sure that if they know who he is, they have people behind him and on the exits. They are not on a legal operation; they are not halting the flow of civilians, slow as it might be during this time of day. More collateral damage.

These men are what is left of Hydra. “You are a hard man to find, soldier.” This tells him that he did remove all tracking devices in his arm. He doesn’t answer. 

The man on his left speaks up. “Did you kill your arm removing the killswitches? Because we don't have a tech nearby to make you operable, that'll take at least a week.” Being underestimated is something that usually doesn’t happen to him, and so is the amused feeling he gets. They loom over him as he sits.

“No,” he says, and lashes out quickly. One hard kick to the right and the man has toppled over, his knee useless. The sling has an emergency release that is triggered when pulled, and it falls to the ground uselessly as the Winter Soldier reaches for the man on his left. He kept a knife hidden in the sling and he has his palm around the hilt and the blade buried in the man’s thigh before the sling falls to the ground. His scream is cut off by a solid punch to the jaw.

Remarkably, the only witness to the altercation is a young woman and the agents listening in on the other side of the comm units. 

“They are Hydra,” the Winter Soldier explains to the woman as he cleans the blade on his gauze-wrapped arm. He retrieves the sling and then walks to kick the crawling, crying, broken-kneed one in the face, putting him out for the moment. He gives himself one minute before the other agents are upon him. “I am no longer Hydra,” he says, and the woman looks a just as scared and shocked as she nods.

“I - okay,” she says, and swallows hard as she looks down at the men. She’s clutching her bag with white-knuckled fingers and looks like she’s trying to back away without being obvious about it.

“You should go,” the Winter Soldier says, as gently as he can. He replaces the sling and adjusts it to hide the bloodstain and the hidden knife, and then picks up his backpack to move down to where the train will arrive. He’s not prepared for her to follow him toward the farthest bench. 

“I’m waiting for this train too,” and with that she sits next to him. She pulls a newspaper out of her bag and begins to read it with shaking hands, and keeps it held up as the agents finally arrive and run toward their fallen. The train arrives then and they walk board it, and if the agents see him once he is on the train it is too late. 

He leaves her for a different car. He wonders why she helped him, and figures it was more out of fear than any other reason. He knows why he didn’t kill anyone.

  


6.  


He leaves New York a day later. He gets his hair cut. He keeps growing out his facial hair. He has a dream about sleeping on a couch and waking up to see Steve Rogers sitting across from him, sketching on a notepad.

_“What are you drawing?” He hears himself ask. He sounds hoarse. There’s a shaking feeling inside of him that he can’t place, a horrible shuddering feeling that he can’t lose. He isn’t the person asking these questions but he also is. He is the person waking up on this old, uncomfortable couch, completely at ease with his old best friend before they joined the war. He feels safe and warm and tired, and he can feel himself smiling up at Steve as Steve smiles down at him._

_“You, you lazy bum.” The Winter Soldier wants to feel anger but the words are said with such affection that he’s stunned and silenced. “Look at you!” Steve says this and shows Bucky the notepad, and it’s him._

_He looks like he looks now, short hair trimmed and a little rough around the edges, with a partial beard. He looks tired and sort of ill, and he’d been sleeping, one arm over his head and stretched out in his undershirt. If it were anyone but him he’d think it were a beautiful drawing._

_“Are you feeling better?” Steve’s asking, and the Winter Soldier can’t remember when he was last sick._

_“Yeah, but you still shouldn’t be here,” Bucky says. “You can’t get this thing, Stevie.” From the determined look on his face, the Winter Soldier is pretty sure that Steve Rogers doesn’t leave._

_“Not going to happen. I ran into Mrs. Stein on the way up and she has some extra soup, so I’m going to heat that up. You need to eat, Buck, you look like you’ve lost 10 pounds in the past two days,” Steve says as he gets up, and Bucky can hear him puttering around the kitchen._

_He feels weak and unsteady as he stands to follow Steve. “Don’t need to do this, pal, I’ll be fine and it’ll pass by tomorrow, you know me. You can’t get this thing,” Bucky says again. He’s in the kitchen now and Steve is at the stove._

_“How many times have you taken care of me?” Steve asks. “Now hush up and sit at the table, you look ready to topple over.”_

The Winter Soldier wakes up crying and missing a best friend he hadn’t thought he had. Despite the photographic evidence, having a memory in his head that elicits such a pain in his chest is something he isn’t prepared for. He doesn’t go back to sleep.

  


7.  


Memories go from a small trickle to a waterfall then, and not just memories about Steve or the Red Room. He remembers his parents and how they helped him and Steve get their own place. He remembers Steve’s mom’s funeral and his own grief mixing with this feeling of terror at Steve’s well-being; fragile Steve who is his best friend and the best person he knows, the strongest and brightest soul he has ever known.

He logically knows how he forgot Steve Rogers, and how he forgot everything. It hurts to think about, like the pain is splitting him in two from head to chest, but he can understand how it happened. He remembers the mindwipes and he remembers how he’d learned that voluntarily submitting to them was better than not. He knows that he just did things, and that usually why and how didn’t factor into his mission. He remembers most things, now.

He doesn’t remember feeling this extraordinarily guilty. He’s not the same person he was when he was Bucky. He wouldn’t be; he has bad things, horrible things under his name and on his hands. He has killed more people than SHIELD knows about, and probably more than Hydra since he was in service to the Soviets. 

He has never done something as terrible as shoot Steve Rogers, or let him fall. The has never been as terrified as he is now; he knows Steve, and since Steve knows he’s alive he’ll be looking for him. He can’t let Steve find him, he can’t hurt Steve again. 

Bucky moves around a lot more after he starts truly remembering. He takes buses everywhere, usually at night and to where ever is cheapest. He sometimes sight-sees when the place has something interesting or new or odd, and he finds himself snagging postcards on the way out of these places.

He writes on them, little memories like “I remembered that time we rode Ferris Wheel and it got stuck with us at the top. I gave you my jacket because of the wind, and we were late for my curfew by almost 2 hours. Mom still let you stay over.” This is from Chicago, and Bucky doesn’t mail it. 

“Your redhead friend who is always on tv now, I trained her. I’m not sure if she told you that. I guess it was a good thing that I trained her, or else it might have ended worse. Her name was Natalia when I knew her.” This is on the back of a postcard from Nashville. He likes the barbecue but finds the music sad and grating. 

“I was asleep for the Battle of New York. I’m glad it’s safe.” Bucky writes on a postcard boasting about New Orleans’ Mardi Gras celebration. 

“Being this high up doesn’t scare me anymore. I’ve survived falls like this. It kind of puts things into perspective.” The St. Louis Arch is tall, but the worst part about it is the little car ride up to the top.

He doesn’t mail any of them, and he wouldn't even if he knew where to address them. He sticks them in his backpack and pretends they aren’t there until he writes another and adds it to the collection.


End file.
